Rebels without a clue

Thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute and the Claremont Review of Books for affording us the privilege of rolling out a few of my favorite pieces from the new Fall issue. Subscriptions to the CRB are only $14.95 a year; subscribe here.

We’ve enjoyed William Voegeli’s essays in the CRB on the Democratic Party’s inability to define itself (“The endless party”) and on Social Security’s failure (“False security”). In the new issue of the CRB, Voegeli looks at Joseph Heath’s and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. These Canadian critics aim most of their fire at the flamboyant “transformative Left,” those who would rather perform guerilla theater than learn to govern effectively. Voegeli concludes:

For conservatives, the easy part is to agree with the book’s devastating critique of countercultural inanities. The hard part is to know what to think of its authors’ political project. A serious Left could be: a welcome change from the gassy self-righteousness of the transformative Left; a newly formidable adversary; or people one can do business with, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s remark about Mikhail Gorbachev. Of course, a serious Left may turn out, instead, to be simply impossible–a contradiction in terms.